Topical 23/2/21

They’re coming. The 178-year-old Economist newspaper is not given to flights of fantasy but may have confirmed a Topical reader’s prognosis of several months ago regarding Australia’s recent catalogue of natural disasters. “We have had drought, bushfires, floods and now the mouse plague,” he said. All that was missing, he predicted, was ‘an invasion from outer space’. Now, The Economist has published a report that a mysterious object passed through our solar system at about 200,000 mph in 2017. “It was small, about 400 metres long and shiny – perhaps 10 times shinier than any asteroid or comet. It seemed to have an elongated cigar-like shape at least 5 to 10 times longer than it was wide. Later it was generally deemed to have been flat like a pancake. Astronomers had never seen anything like it.” The Economist story was quoting astronomer Harvard Professor Avi Loeb. Prof. Loeb has published a book ‘Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life beyond Earth.’ Let’s deal with the mice before we worry about the ETs.